I'm here to talk about Barbara. That's not her real name, for me or maybe you, but you probably have or have had a Barbara.

That coworker who cannot do a single ticket correctly, and in fact must redo every ticket threefold before they are finally resolved. You avoid responding to them in group chat. You know better now. If you answer, you'll become responsible for resolving their entire issue, but their name is the one that will go on the ticket. Trying to explain something to them, even something simple that is vital to their everyday job ends with you pulling out your hair as they attempt to repeat your words back to you and reveal their persistent misunderstanding as you listen to something that doesn't in the slightest resemble anything you just relayed to them. They even shotgun answers to every question asked in chat with no concern for whether the answer is correct or could add hours of extra labor and headaches for level 2 to sort out.

Finally, and this is the most egregious part of all, your boss is fully aware of their incompetence and refuses to do anything about it. Perhaps your boss knows something you don't. Perhaps Barbara is not a real coworker, perhaps instead they are an effigy, a totem strategically maintained to channel and consolidate the spiritual miasma of incompetence in one individual so as to ward the rest of the team against it. Or perhaps your boss simply derives catharsis and entertainment from your suffering. It is not for you to know. You merely know that to live is to suffer and to have a Barbara is to live in suffering.

I first became aware of Barabara on day one. She was assigned to train me. My workplace is a small company and very disorganized, so training involved throwing us onto the phone with no knowledge base to speak of or actual knowledge of our work at all, pretending we knew exactly what we were doing, and then begging our seniors in chat to, "please answer my question, I've been stalling this lady for twenty minutes and have no idea what to do."

When available, our trainers would ask us to ride along on some of their simpler calls or invite us to share our screen on Teams to walk us through something.

I asked my assigned trainer Barabara for her help exactly once.

Having done IT work before, I had gathered as much information as possible and taken extensive notes on the call I received. A single instance of our software on one machine would not connect, another adjacent machine on the same network could. It could be a server issue, but my experience told me it was more likely an issue local to the machine. I explained my suspicions to Barbara.

Barbara explained to me that it was probably an issue with the server and proceeded to immediately connect to the server we hosted for the customer. She insisted that sometimes if you fiddled with some things, turned stuff off and on, and disabled or enabled other things the issue would be fixed. I am not being vague on the details of her methodology for the sake of expedience, these are almost verbatim the exact words she used. To this day I have no idea what she was doing on the server for the excruciating half hour that followed as I forced a strained smile and reassured the customer that our, "resident expert" was looking into their issue. I think I do not want to know. Some knowledge is not for those who wish to remain of sound mind to know.

At minute twenty-five of listening to Barbara make strained sounds of confusion and frustration over Teams, I was getting desperate. Barbara was not listening to my insistent suggestions that perhaps investigating the local machine would prove more enlightening. Off to the side, I messaged another coworker who had been assigned to train a compatriot in much the same way Barabara had been assigned to me. He told me to hold on and that he'd take a look in a minute.

To my great relief Barbara by happenstance had an urgent appointment she needed to be on in five minutes and recommended I escalate a ticket to level 2 because this issue was completely beyond our ability to solve. I expressed my immense disappointment that she had to go but assured her that I'd get right on that as I surreptitiously connected the other senior to the computer I was working on. Within three minutes he opened the software, looked at it, checked the settings, closed it, opened an INI file, changed a 1 to 0, and gave the customer and me a concise and simple explanation as to why that change fixed it as he demonstrated that everything was working now.

I never made the mistake of asking Barbara for help again. In fact, I managed to consistently dodge her "training", expressing my truly heartfelt disappointment that our schedules seemingly never lined up as I silently parried her every submitted request for access to my Outlook calendar. She seemed genuinely sorry that she wasn't fulfilling her obligation to me, unknowingly being of far greater help to me in her complete absence. By the six-month mark, I managed to badger my other seniors in private messages for solutions to every problem I ran across until my own knowledge surpassed Barbara's limited skillset many times over despite her, as I learned later, three years of tenure over me.

Unfortunately, this fact is the only thing she managed to catch onto quickly, and soon I became yet another person constantly tagged in chat for her urgent self-made emergencies.

There are more stories. Many, many more of Barbara. Each of them a solitary towering peak of frustration and futility in a mountain range of constant incomprehensible interactions that leave me questioning my sanity and competence. But I'll leave you with just the one for now.